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GRAND SLAMS Other sports are more boring than baseball but can’t think of one I hate more. Has everything to do with growing up in a family living the game 24/7/365: The McLains, who’d soon enough have first son become the infamous ex-Detroit Tigers pitcher and ex-con Denny McLain, the first pitcher since Dizzy Dean to win thirty games in a single season. (The last part a tiresome appendage nevertheless compulsory.) I’m related as first cousin and for about eighteen years was more or less a third brother who always addressed Denny and still do as Dennis, and in retaliation he calls me Ralphie. So to believe Bull Durham is the only movie about baseball hitting a grand slam without needing to be in a stadium is probably saying my experience with Dennis isn’t about the “science” of throwing and swinging at balls—in truth, I was so bad at the sport I couldn’t even cut it as a batboy, having been replaced by a set of twin girls—it’s more about experiencing the jock fanaticism for “the show” overwhelming athletes. Bull Durham doesn’t explicitly examine the undercurrent of sports corruption but implies its presence—the fixation for winning inhibits mental, emotional and ethical norms. Kevin Costner’s Crash is half-Dennis: he’s the physical portrait, minus the fat ass poundage, we’ll see in failed or soon-to-be-retired sports figures before they’re farmed out to the pastures of card dealerships or radio jocksters, punch-drunk less from the ever-handy Bud than from their sport having consumed them. The performance might have been warning about how sports suppress maturity: Dennis, for example, wrote three books—Nobody’s Perfect, Strikeout and I Told You I Wasn’t Perfect—personifying “it’s still everybody else’s fault” as excuse for ending up in prison twice. The performance isn’t cautionary because Crash’s other half isn’t sociopathic: he’s a rarity—a thinking man’s athlete who recognizes the trap, that too often the field of ambitions is a marathon of drudgery, with an athletic striving to become record-setting icon not primarily because of who he wants to be or what his talents are, but because of what others want from him, like Dennis living out the dream of his father. There’s one accepted implicit explanation in the self-justifying memoirs: his father, a by-the-belt disciplinarian, died at the age of 36 from a sudden heart attack when Dennis was a high school freshman, already a local celebrity and not just for throwing a merciless fastball: he was also a prodigy at the Hammond organ. (Whenever hearing Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” his recital version inevitably supersedes.) From I Told You I Wasn’t Perfect, “Suddenly I had no rules to follow and nobody to control me. And it was from that point forward that I just started doing whatever the hell I pleased.” Considering the realities of baseball as I perceive them, Bull Durham is of course too clever by half: name the players in one or any of the major or bush league teams able to tell us who Susan Sontag is. (Dennis would know, being intensely media-aware, a gift which helped make him a polemic radio and TV talk show host.) This name-dropping doesn’t hurt the movie one bit, and for baseball haters, it’s pure revel—telling us director-screenwriter Ron Shelton has one eye on the bleachers of the bored and the other on the mound. And often both on the bed: this movie is insistently sexy, tantalizing for its over-emphasis on crotches. Not only are the men’s frequently filling up the screen, leading lady Susan Sarandon is quite eager to expose hers. When not spreading the legs or jingle-jangling silver jewelry, her Annie is reciting Blake and Whitman. She’s not just an over-dressed, hot-to-trot poetess, she’s also a groupie-coach who literally builds a candle-lit shrine ready for the Church of Baseball, about which a hater could lose it as fast as one of Dennis’s pitches. Sarandon almost didn’t get to play her: “I had to grovel,” she told the N.Y.Times. “The studio had a list of people who they preferred, and I was not on it.” Those others refused to audition, so when Shelton asked her to move beyond the humiliation of having to read, she dressed herself up in a “showy red and white striped” number as the clincher. (Works in the movie as well.) Happily, Sarandon’s been decaffed, so viewers won’t have to go through the jitters of her feminism, yet, no matter how wonderful she is—the performance gets better in repeat viewings—I have to say I’ve known few women like her Annie except in television, where she’d have a brief career as a sportscaster. (Her intelligence would threaten the station’s chief sports anchor.) We’ve all met plenty of the other kind, the bimbos whose only aims are to pull at the jockstraps. Dennis’s long-suffering wife Sharyn, who passed in December, 2019, was halfway up the Annie scale. Coming from a baseball father, the illustrious Lou Boudreau, she wasn’t monomaniacal for the love of the game; she didn’t light up novenas or fill out any home scoresheets from WGN’s televised games like her husband did as a teenager, filling countless binders of them. Frequently stylized in high-pile hair to lessen her shortness, she resembled Astrud Gilberto—IOW, 60s incarnate. In spite of Dennis’s mother’s objections as warnings not to, I liked her immediately; she was funny, extremely well-mannered and an unostentatious Annie clotheshorse at the games, the latest in Hudson’s apparel. She smiled a lot when the cameras were on and, understandably, was stoic by long-practice over Dennis’s legal whammies, staying away from the media snooping for headlines. (She sometimes quietly blamed his shyster behavior on gullibility; no one bought it.) Mother of four, she kept the family together during the darkest hours, and it’s perhaps Dennis’s one clear statement of truth that she could be deemed a saint. She did, however, divorce him when he re-upped for another term of involuntary servitude after embezzling other people’s retirement funds. During this period, under treatment for high blood pressure, she had a heart attack. Released after six years in the pen, Dennis got down on his knees to beg forgiveness and asked her to remarry him. Remaining together, she would be diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease and, following doctors’ orders, he lost roughly 160 pounds using Bariatric surgery, having tipped the scales beyond 300. (He has since regained substantial poundage.) This couple confirms one of the most inexplicable mysteries of life we all experience and without prejudice—nothing is more blind than love.
Text COPYRIGHT © 2005 RALPH BENNER (Revised 10/2020) All Rights Reserved.
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On a 2006 jaunt to Minneapolis, I and a friend decided to take in an early matinee and, both liking Joan Allen’s edginess, watched The Upside of Anger. She didn’t let us down, hitting her own grand slam as the most entertaining boozed bitch supreme in American movies in years. Knowing nothing about the picture before hand, the other surprise was Costner who, substantially distant from the nonsense of Field of Dreams and For The Love of the Game (in which he plays a distinctly different Detroit Tigers pitcher), carries nearly twenty extra pounds as a boozing, pot-smoking ex-baseball player-now-radio-personality. I leaned over to my friend and said, “He sounds like Dennis.” Sure enough Mike Bender, who smartly wrote and directed, modeled some parts of Costner’s Denny on him, relative to the years he gigged as popular WXYT blabbermouth, more in schmoozy smartass mode than hard drinking; in case anyone has forgotten, Dennis’s “sauce” of choice was Pepsi and he didn’t partake in smoking anything. Costner’s Denny has Dennis’s chronic inability to keep sports the center of chat on his radio show, and also has his dependence on selling sports memorabilia, buying box loads of Rawlings baseballs to be signed in order to “keep me in firewood,” braving the indignity of having his picture taken with the “fat fucks.” (Dennis continues the lucrative “keepsakes-for-fat fucks” circuit. Check out his websites and Twitter account.) Costner’s Denny has redemptive qualities, while real Dennis semi-regularly walks the path of The Downside of Stupid: in a radio interview, he pulled out of nowhere one of his inexplicable whoppers about his Polish-American Roman Catholic mother as a Jew who intervened to prevent him from signing up with the N.Y. Yankees. Even the website